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by Lorenz Keller
Half a Möbius strip, twice as complicated
11.3.2026
Translation: machine translated
What's even crazier than a Möbius strip? Half a Möbius strip! Researchers have now produced a molecule with this improbable topology - even in two variants that can be switched back and forth.
It is a molecule with an unprecedented topology: the compound with the formula C13Cl2 only looks like a simple circle with two extensions at first glance. Instead, the electronic structure of the molecule resembles a ribbon that is twisted into itself several times. A hypothetical tiny visitor walking along the ring would have to make four rounds to get back to the starting point. The fascinating material is therefore a more complicated form of the famous Möbius strip - a circle that is twisted once inside itself and therefore has no inside and no outside.
The molecule presented on 5 March 2026 in the scientific journal «Science» - the researchers refer to it as a «half Moebius strip» - is the work of an international team from the IT company IBM, Oxford University, the University of Regensburg, ETH Zurich and its sister institute EPFL. To produce it, the experts first applied a precursor compound - a ring of 13 carbon atoms carrying 10 chlorine atoms (C13Cl10) - to a special gold substrate, which was coated with a double layer of NaCl. Using a scanning tunnelling microscope, they removed eight of the ten chlorine atoms one by one with atomic precision.
The twisted C13Cl2 was formed from the initially flat ring, in two variants, each with the opposite direction of twisting. Calculations with an IBM quantum computer with 72 qubits confirmed that the electronically twisted structure had been created.
For future materials and applications, it is particularly interesting that the mirror-image shapes could be transformed into each other using electromagnetic pulses. It was also possible to produce a flat, non-twisted intermediate state. Substances that can be switched back and forth in this way are exciting for applications in electronics, for example as sensors.
Spectrum of science
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Header image: IBM / University of Manchester (excerpt)
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